His Girlfriend's Dog

By Lewis Shiner

One day he saw himself the way his girlfriend's dog saw him. Huge, slow, precariously built, insensitive to moods and hungers and smells, overly fastidious about privates and dung. Soon he found his girlfriend incomprehensible, perhaps even cruel. Her actions seemed deliberately meant to puzzle him. His sense of play offended her.

After they broke up she would call him. "Ernie misses you," she would say.